Entries Tagged 'Nature' ↓

In a recent book review discussing a book on lonliness and its negative impact on health, there was this curious passage.

If subjects are told for the purposes of experiment that they will face a lonely future, they score lower on intelligence tests and abandon tasks sooner. If cookies are set before subjects who have been told that no one else in the experiment wants to work with them, they eat twice as many as those who have been told that everyone else in the experiment wants to work with them.

I’ve always argued against the idiocy of half the ethics guidelines but this seems a good case for a query. Its not hard to imagine a long lasting, let’s say a haunting continuing echo, of a directive that you are lonely and will die alone in your apartment, your body not being discovered for days, and possibly being partially eaten by cats.

And in other health related news…

This courtesy of InventorSpot
…the shopping cart wash…capitalizing on all the germophobes out there.

You gotta end with something good…great animal portrait from the best nature photography of the year at NationalGeographic

This is a detail from a Joan Miro poster I have been happily living with for years.

On that note, today’s NYT has a great slide show of mostly lesser known works from the man. Including:

And for another sort of art, see EnglishRussia for more of this sort of thing.

And at the same site today, pictures of Kamchatka, including this:

Which is akin to these Chinese mountains at Yangshuo from randomwire.com:

This easily got past my cat picture filter. From EnglishRussia.

1. From OddityCentral, this picture an amateur took of a stingray migration which may have consisted of as many as 10,000 individuals.  See OddityCentral for more.

2. From SecretDead, this poster (see SecretDead for the source).

3. From DailyDoseOfImagery, that dinner in the sky phenomenon first reported in Brussels has now made it to Toronto. See DailyDose for more images.

4. Finally from DerSpeigel a story on the ongoing Naples garbage scandal. The take here is that they are sending in “crisis psychologists” to help with the tension.

Makes more sense to send out the Mafia clowns who are most responsible for this.

This little amble lies somewhere between “I’m just saying” and “if I were king”. Its also partly throwing something out there and seeing if there’s some huge problem with what I’m thinking…if so, give me the virtual slap but give me good reasons why.

So this is it. I’ve no doubt that global warming is taking place and no doubt that plenty of it is human driven. What I don’t see is why that is a problem for non humans, and specifically how it is bad for the planet. The planet has gone through many changes and you can’t really say that one era is any better than another. Even if you use the debatable measure that life is better than no life, life has stayed pretty constant through all the changes. Yes, species come and go, prosper or decline but that’s the way things go, weather changes or not. And yet, on the news yesterday I heard that global warming was not good for the planet.

Humans will suffer if there is climate change. And unfortunately it will hit those who are already the most disadvantaged. (And I guess my point it that if every human died, the planet itself would be just fine….man is not the measure of all things).

Here’s the thing: We may not be successful with all the programs we are attempting to put into place. They work best with everyone on board and that just doesn’t seem to be happening. It may be a colossal waste of time and money.

Might it not be better to go with the flow? Assume that things are going to get worse and throw efforts in the direction of coping with that change. Direct the efforts towards those who need it rather than spreading it into places where the effect will not matter as much.

Fighting global warming the way we are right now seems to me like trying to perpetuate outmoded manners of existence for as long as possible when we should be thinking about alternatives.

I’m not saying go out there and burn up as much fuel as possible because that supports a very wasteful infrastructure that really does destroy life (unlike global warming which just kind of shifts it around).

Thoughts?

1. Headline of the week from nature.com.

Water snails crawl along under the water surface on ripples of slime.

2. From DerSpiegel, this image shows that manually pulling boats upriver is probably a superior way to tighten up those glutes than the stairmaster. Now this would make an infomercial!

3. And from OObject.com, three great condom ads:

Slow movers opt for a single sex

Slow-moving animals are unlikely to encounter many prospective mates and thus should be hermaphrodites to maximise their mating opportunities - if all else fails they can mate with themselves.

This might explain those stains on the Lazyboy.

*

And then we have the most charming story via Architektur of a woman who married the Eiffel Tower.  Sounds like the title of a one of those short stories redolent of whim and quirk but no, it’s true.

The lucky groom.

Erika (surname: La Tour Eiffel) had married the Parisian landmark the previous year. Revisiting the girders where the ceremony took place, clutching her wedding veil, she gyrated against the structure. She could feel the cold of the Tower meeting the warmth of her body to produce an “equilibrium”. But if object-love really was like human love, then Erika was putting it about a bit, because she was also having a torrid time with the Golden Gate Bridge and the Berlin Wall, fragments of which she called “my boys”; the Eiffel Tower she called “she” – maybe she is a bisexual objectum sexual.

At the Golden Gate Bridge she agonised about the two of them ever being alone, what with the traffic and sight-seers. “Our love is no different than the love between two beings,” she claimed. Erika wanted to be an object, not human; her friend Amy was proud never to have been touched by another person (although she did hug Erika).

Amy was in love with the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building, whose flank she nuzzled and whispered sweet nothings to, until a security guard asked her to clear off. So she started loudly exclaiming her devotion – “Chaaaa-CHAAAAA!” – instead. Asperger’s and autism were mentioned as possible conditions underlying the women’s passions, but the only thing they shared was a history of abuse and abandonment. Erika had been discharged from the Armed Forces for refusing to stop sleeping with a ceremonial sword.

So, was she plaintively singing this song to the big boy in the early stages?

Just a couple of comments if I may:

1.  You know this is exactly what those people who were worried about where allowing gay marriage said we would end up.
2. I guess if he starts off as cold and unfeeling everybody knows where they stand. Well she always knows where he stands.
3. Better than ending up old and alone I guess.
and maybe you saw this one coming…
4. They’ll always (long long long    p      a     u      s    e) have Paris.

A few months ago I wrote about the absurd justification for hunting in that it taught you a respect for life. In the latest Harpers‘, Christopher Ketcham writes about the culling of the Yellowstone bison herds because they might impact on the marginal profitability of the cattle herds which by the way are being supported by free access to government (read public) lands, supported by American taxpayers to the tune of about 120 million dollars a year (the most conservative estimate).

The cattleman associations around Yellowstone complain about the possibility of interspecies infection despite that according to the Trade Environment Database “there has never been a verified case of brucellosis transmission in free ranging bison to grazing cattle.”

I won’t go into too much detail here, get a copy of the magazine and read the rest (as with every issue, there’s plenty more in there worth reading as well). It has one of those passages that is both wondrous and tragic, reminiscent of those descriptions of passenger pigeons blotting out the sun for hours as they passed overhead. And then the next year none.

Between 1870 and 1880, at least 10 million buffalo, and possibly as many as 20 million, were killed. Two hundred thousand hides were sold in Fort Worth in a single day. West of Fort Dodge, Kansas, it was said, one could walk a hundred miles along the Santa Fe line hopscotching the dead. Army Colonel Richard Dodge, stationed in Kansas in 1873, wrote that “the air was foul with a sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelve months before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.

Once again, we never seem to run out of reasons for saddling up, grabbing a rifle, and taking out a few of a population that really cannot afford to lose any members.

The Goblin Shark. Its liver may account for up to a fourth of its weight. Found in deep sea but rare enough that little is really known about it other than its good looks.

An arresting image but no information about the type.

The Greenland Shark. Largest specimen ever caught was over 1000 kilograms. The flesh is poisonous.

So I might not want to be in the water but would love to be at this underwater restaurant in the Maldives.

Solar Eclipse at the Antarctic

Jument Lighthouse in France from DeputyDog’s Collection of Lighthouses

Casa Battio Staircase from OObject’s Collection of Spiral Staircases

I’ll be in Barcelona in a few days, and may in fact, ascend this wonder.

And from the sublime to the ridiculous: from EarthTimes the Japanese Boob Pudding

The package:

Opened:

From the land of intricate etiquette, cherry blossoms, budo, living treasures, sand gardens and ikebana. Of course.